Our friend is understably having a hard time(it was her kind request too that I put it up in here), yet I would advise her to be patient, and give the child a little more freedom to contemplate on its own -- you shall be overawed soon to discover how many new, fresh perceptions the child would develop to reveal spontaneously.
**My motto : when one is dabbling with the 'music of the spheres', he always gets spontaneous insights, like sudden visions, 'from the spheres' -- a phenomenon which keeps mesmerized and hooked to Music -- a lifelong infatuation which makes a better human being..**
[I have generously borrowed from the internet groups too]..
The standard music notation used in western music shows measures and beats as subdivided by integers, but every musician knows that, believe you me -- they should not be played as written ("-'like many things "as written" that are not to be played that way).
**Nor is there a universal way to transform the notation into "music in the air" -- the sooner this belief grows,the better..
There are one collection of conventions and style for 17th century French keyboard music, and another for that written by Beethoven and further along, Duke Ellington,and his school that followed.
Most non-trained people can hear that there is a difference between a drum machine or simple MIDI rendition and how human musicians would play the same score. Some score programs have a feature for playing back the notations, and there are parameters that can be adjusted to give hints to how the playback program should both phrase and pulse the music. This sometimes works pretty well, and other times produces incoherence.
And when one learns music from a musician- teacher, he first learns the phasing and pulsing via singing (as "oral culture body rhythms" -- advocated by Francois Couperin I guess in the 1720s & 30s), and are later shown what the notation actually looks like. This dispenses with the considerable pain of trying to divide the measures and beats evenly which,to me, has essentially no musical significance(though I do not claim to be an authority on Music).
One of the reasons for the success of the oral learning first is that our brains (partly via language use) are really great at hearing and remembering and imitating rhythms (even though we have a very difficult time reading them).
For example, in "Green Fields" when one is to play on piano, he plays 3 notes in one hand against 4 in the other in the same time interval. But the oral rhythm is:
" Snowfall -- || -- snowfall -- || falling - | - along..", where both hands start on the first "jump" and then alternate. When I tried it on a table with both hands slowly and then speed up, I noticed myself winding up with a particular kind of "texture" -- THIS is and what the composer wanted.
What is used in music instead of integer multiples is more subtle and starts with the idea of "pulse". This is actually not perfectly metronomic but one feels it is a sense of "connected emphases" that move through the temporal axis.
Compared to the metronome and looking at both "beat" and "measure" boundaries it ebbs and flows ( I had a sudden feeling of being alive and breathing and heart beating (which are somewhat regular but not clocklike).
This can sometimes be very pronounced -- for example, in the Bach Violin and Cello Sonatas (even more so in mazurkas) where the first "beat" is stretched quite a bit and the others are compressed, and the most regular thing one looks at would be where in time each measure commences (and even here there is ebb and flow).
Organists will often play Bach passagework "violinstyle" to help provide accents that the organ cannot put forth in any other way.
Jazz musicians call good uses of pulse "grooving" and "laying down a groove". (I strongly believe that when one plays music -- need not be perfect, but yes with Passion,he is creating a kind of life)
Similarly, a bunch of quarter notes in a row (even on the same note) are not played the same, and are not heard as quite the same.
A teenaged Mozart once wrote to his father : 6 year.old son letters to his father :
"Notes are silver, but rests are gold". And he means putting gaps judiciously between notes where there are no rests written. (And in rubato playing to decouple the hands from the same pulse: more regular in the left hand and more "ragged" in the right)
Initially I used to think of the written notation as a kind of shorthand in which a lot of context is supplied by the player via both conventions and personal style. This is not unlike theatrical conventions ( where only the dialogue is given for the play, and the players and director have to figure out what it is about and how to say this dialogue and to whom and why. --classic example most plays of Ibsen)
In Shakespearean blank verse iambic couplets, one uses exactly the same approach as with music to avoid metronomic sing songing, but to let the meanings take front and center and the iambic pulse be a subtle background coloration (not unlike lighting and set).
Ending with a personal observation for which I risk being lynched : As years pass by, I feel that, in the larger scheme of things, it is kind of a human myth that any adult knows enough to teach a young child. What often happens is the adults start to teach their own misconceptions.
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Sent from my BlackBerry®
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Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri, M.B.B.S
Consultant Physician [special interest
in Cardiology &Critical Care]
Mumbai, India
(+91)9870611252
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"The most beautiful thing we can
experience is the Mysterious."
---- Albert Einstein
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